Poem in February
My neighbor’s garage has a billiards table
and flags with logos for death metal bands
and when I buy my mushrooms from him,
I sit on the black leather futon and pay
in attention: sometimes up to four hours
of conspiracy theories: the government
controls our minds with cell phone towers
and crows and everything in my life
is attracted by my own electromagnetic energy,
which I supposed includes the time a man
I trusted grabbed my breast while I sat
eyes closed on a couch at a tailgate
and I heard him whisper “it’s free”
to someone I couldn’t see. I’m told
sometimes I am too much. I look good
in the flesh of beasts: leather and fur
and feathers. I play the game of how long
can I keep my mouth shut, how minutely
can I nod my head, how soon can I skip back
to my own garage and crouch on the concrete,
trace the oil drip patterns with my fingers,
tell myself that someday I will stop feeling
ridiculous. Every day I confront my students:
how do you want to die? What makes this all
worth it? And they are like, please let us
do a group project. My poems swim up
from the bottom of the pond, from algae
and the guts of fish. Having procured my shrooms,
I watch the oaks refract in the water,
contemplate their chiasmic nature: branches
are roots and roots are branches and I am unbearably
light, like I used to be back when all I wanted
was to go home, to get back into bed with you.
Dorsey Craft is the author of A Brief History of Accidental Inventions and Plunder. Her work has appeared in the Adroit Journal, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, POETRY Magazine, and elsewhere. A recent Yaddo Fellow, she teaches at the University of North Florida and serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Agni.
